Anne and George, are two lively, educated and committed octogenarians. A great intellectual complicity makes them share an exemplary daily routine, dictated by dignity, love and mutual respect. They attend their students' concerts and share their days listening to music and reading books in their beautiful home filled with history and art.

One day Anne, in the kitchen has like a break from life, becomes entranced in a wide-eyed position disconnected from her surroundings. A carotid artery occlusion will decide for an operation that will not have a good outcome: she will return home in a wheelchair with a left hemiparesis and all the difficulties to face. The couple will manage to organize themselves, and George's absolute love and Anne's grace will not fail until a second heart attack prevents her from even using speech.

Enormous difficulties will arise in addition to Anne's explication that she never wants to return to the hospital and her attempts to convince George of her weariness of living in that condition.

The confrontations between the father and his daughter on what to do will be merciless: "talking seriously" as George demands means not falling back on hypocrisies that are disrespectful to Anne's intimacy and that she does not want to exhibit her condition. In fact, George does not have the "time to worry about others' concerns," he is completely devoted to Anne's condition and her modesty. Often difficult confrontations will feature them, such as Anne's obstinacy in refusing hydration, until an unforeseen outcome. Haneke's greatness will follow this moment with a pause for reflection accompanied by the viewing of some artistic images almost as a seal on a human landscape that is anything but consoling: a series of paintings that seem to portray a pause to the torment that accompanies life.

An exemplary psychological sentimental martyrdom leads the film's thread under the careful watchfulness of Haneke, always an uncompromising and relentless practitioner adept at disquieting dormant souls.

His scientific and unapologetic restraint does not allow him, as in any of his previous films, to pause without disturbing, to acquiesce in perceptual addiction without replication.

Haneke's viewer can never simply be a consumer but must be there, must participate critically by confronting himself and his own questions.

He must become a "conscious victim" as the director claims, because his cinema must destabilize.

Seeing this film is an irreversible experience: a film about love for its own sake, about love as an antidote to disillusionment. Life, however, remains intransigent and ruthless and will always have the last word.

The magnificent final shots, in typical Hanekeian style, leave open, as always, endless question marks, because the answer is not there and the rejection of the "happy end" remains " the only honest behavior available to cinematic art."

Haneke's word.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice